Reliance Life Insurance Set To Embrace ISO 27001

Reliance Life Insurance has aggressive expansion plans for FY08-09. The company plans to roll out 1,200 branches across India this year to add to its current network of 700 branches. Expanding the branch footprint in a stipulated timeframe brings an equal amount of pressure on procuring IT infrastructure resources as other resources like land, people etc. Biztech2.0 caught up with Milind Sawant, head, IT Infrastructure, Reliance Life Insurance, to get insights into his infrastructure team, the company’s recent initiatives like virtualisation and network optimisation, security standards at the BPO level and IRDA regulations.

Can you shed light on the virtualisation initiative being undertaken at Reliance Life?

We are virtualising the servers in the DC basically to save on power and space. We have changed our technology roadmap in the recent past to address legacy issues. About four months back, we adopted blade server technology that addresses both power and space issues. Going further, we have linked certain insurance agents to selected servers for a fortnight (starting August 1) to observe their work patterns and determine which are the high and low volume periods for the business. This will help us to consolidate our data and resources. Our ultimate aim is to pool all of this into one box. It is very similar to bandwidth-on-demand.

The ultimate plan is simple – to build an IT infrastructure that provides resources as and when needed because insurance is not like banking where resources are utilised 24X7. Generally, the pressure starts mounting towards month end and year end. There is tremendous pressure towards year end. So we do the hardware capacity planning and load balancing considering the transaction potential at that point in time. The inference is that the insurance industry’s pattern puts comparatively more load on the system at month ends and year ends than at any other time of the year.

To explain the above with a hypothetical scenario, if the business volume at the beginning of the month can be handled by four CPUs then why block fourteen other CPUs. They can be utilised somewhere else. We are using Sun’s M5000 servers and HP blade servers. Understanding the industry’s pattern will help us to allocate our resources better.

How was the experience on the network optimisation drive?

On the network side, we have just completed a major bandwidth optimisation initiative. Currently, there are 758 company branches connected on our MPLS network resulting in huge cost. We have adopted the six sigma three technique for bandwidth optimisation that I believe will help us save around Rs 2.5 cr. The company also intends to set up an NOC (Network Operations Centre), which will enable us to view the link status of 458 links on a single console. This was visualised in-house, which helped the company save a major amount of cost. I always believe that it helps to train people rather than bringing in the vendor.

Any prospective regulations expected from the IRDA from a technology perspective that Reliance Life is working on?

Our roadmap for 2008-09 has been framed keeping in mind expected IRDA regulations. We are rolling out a major initiative to get the company ready to meet the ISO 27001 security standard. Reliance Life is ISO 9001 compliant since the last two years and in the coming six months the DC will be ISO 27001 compliant. There are also initiatives being taken on the application front keeping in mind the future regulatory environment.

What is the best practice for getting work done from employees down the hierarchy?

It is very easy to change the systems or technologies within an enterprise or to choose the right vendor for a deployment; however, change management or shaping people’s mindset is like climbing uphill. I firmly believe that the solution for successful change management lies in ’trusting people’. This indirectly builds employee confidence. I also believe in drawing clear lines for the division of roles and responsibilities before fixing employee KPIs.